August 4, 2021

Resource update

Wondering whether a policy you are about to code is already in the dataset? In order to make it easier for you to keep track of more than 80,000 policies, we are happy to announce a new tool - the Duplicate Detector! Hopefully, this automated first check will help you in your coding and prevent duplicates in the future.

Big thanks to Abdul Ali Khan for taking the initiative and building something so user friendly!

July 27, 2021

Resource update

Wondering about the different policy types and their sub-types? In order to make it easier for you guys to sort through the different policy types, information on the policy sub-types can now be found in the Coding Guide. Hopefully this will make it a lot easier for you to quickly figure out the different options when coding.

Big thanks to Isaac Bravo for his amazing work with this!!

July 05, 2021

Resource update

Confused about health testing and health monitoring policies? Check out this updated video and two new slides on what is NOT health testing and health monitoring in the coding guide by Natalia Filkina-Spreizer and Sarah Edmonds for guidance!

July 05, 2021

Taxonomy update

Based on what governments have been doing to deal with the pandemic and many of your guys’ feedback we’ve made a couple of small changes to the taxonomy in particular with respect to:

• Restrictions of Mass Gathering [type_mass_var] can now capture Single/All Recreational or commercial event allowed to occur with conditions
• COVID-19 Vaccines [type_vac_cat] now provide the options Covishield (Indian-made version of AstraZeneca Serum Institute India), EpiVacCorona (EpiVakKorona; VECTOR center of virology), Unspecified Vaccines and All Vaccines
• We’ve added ‘Negative COVID-19 tests’ as an option for External Border Restrictions [type_ext_restrict], Closure and Regulation of Schools [type_school_var], Restrictions and Regulations of Businesses [type_business_var], Restrictions and Regulations of government services [type_gov_var] and Restrictions of Mass Gatherings [type_mass_var]
• Internal Border Restrictions [type_int_restrict] now gets its own sub type which mirrors the External Border Restrictions subtype!
• Closure and Regulation of Schools [type_school_var] now has the options Full remote/distance learning and Partial remote/distance learning

For more detail, please see this document which outlines what this means for you.

June 10, 2021

Resource update

Want to meet other people on this project and learn what to do when governments are implementing crazy things? We’re excited to announce project-wide Coding hours for the next two months! You can refer to this link for a google docs spreadsheet of the schedule. We hope having some project-wide coding hours will help us continue to learn and grow together and double thanks to all the RAs who have volunteered to host!

May 26, 2021

Resource update

Unsure how to code a policy? @Joseph (Kwan Bo) Shim has created a great new tool that provides a model-based best ‘guess’ of a policy based on the policy description. These model-based predictions will continue to improve i) based on your feedback (reach out to Joseph or Cindy!) and ii) as the overall data becomes cleaner and cleaner. We hope this can be an additional resource to asking your fellow RAs, regional/country managers, #ra-chat etc. on your way to taxonomy mastery!

May 14, 2021

Resource update

Confused about the difference between an external and internal border restriction? Check out this great short video by Natalia Filkina-Spreizer and Sarah Edmonds which explains when to code one or the other!

May 14, 2021

Resource update

The CoronaNet RA Onboarding Guide provides a comprehensive overview of different parts of the project for new (and seasoned) RAs, spearheaded by Vanessa Zwisele.

May 14, 2021

Resource update

The CoronaNet Low State Capacity Guidelines provides a guideliens for RAs who find it difficult to find official sources in a given country because they just don’t seem to exist (including e.g. either on Overton Raw Sources Sheet or the Jataware/Starsift Raw Sources or on a given government’s official websites) due to low bureacratic governmental capacity.

May 5, 2021

Resource update

The CoronaNet ‘Other’ Policy Type Potential Miscodings sheet identifies potential policies that have been miscoded as an ‘other’ policy type.

• @Joseph (Kwan Bo) Shim and @Irene N. Chang have created models which try to identify which policies are lilkely miscoded as well as what their best guess and second best guess for what the correct policy type should be. There are around 1000 policies that the model ‘guesses’ are miscoded

• If each RA could take a look for your country and (i) provide feedback as to how well the models do in guessing a more appropriate policy type and (ii) correct the policy for your country as needed, that would be amazing —> this will help us refine our models to identify miscodings more generally and provide further feedback to you all!

April 20, 2021

Taxonomy update

Based on many of your guys’ feedback we’ve made a couple of small changes to the taxonomy in particular with respect to:

• Delivery/takeaway options are now available for Bars, Retail Stores, Supermarkets/grocery stores, Pharmacies and Personal Grooming
  
• There is now a text entry for ‘Retail Businesses’
• There is now an explicit button to code when nursing homes are closed or when patients are restricted from leaving nursing homes in the Social Distancing type!
• We’ve added options to capture suspensions and resumptions of COVID-19 rollouts
• There are now options in target_who_gen for capturing whether a policy targets people with natural immunity, are fully vaccinated, partially vaccinated or not vaccinated against COVID-19 which are particularly important to capture for more recent policy actions.

For more detail, please see this documment which outlines what we’ve changed in more detail.

March 29, 2021

Resource update

Check out this google sheet which identifies what policies likely need to be recoded because of changes to the taxonomy for how to deal with visiting nursing homes, hospitals, prisons and cemeteries

These policies were flagged as likely needing recoding if:

• the policy description contains the word ‘visit’ or words related to nursing homes, hospitals, prisons or cemeteries in the description and if the policy was entered before March 19 (when the taxonomy change took place)

Obviously this is not fool proof :

• False positives: if there is a policy that is not about visiting nursing homes, hospitals, prisons or cemeteries, please put a ‘1’ in the column “This policy is not about visiting nursing homes, hospitals, prisons or cemeteries” (column M) and Cindy will remove it from the list.
• False negatives: It is certainly possible that there are some policies that deal with visiting nursing homes, hospitals, prisons or cemeteries that do not actually have the words ‘visit’ or ‘nursing homes’, ‘hospitals’, ‘prisons’ or ‘cemeteries’ in their description. If people encounter policies that are not on the sheet that should be, please reach out to Cindy!

In general Cindy will update this sheet about once a week so you can track your progress.

March 19, 2021

Taxonomy update

We have made some changes to the taxonomy which reflect both feedback that we’ve gotten from many of you as well as the changing nature of the pandemic. In many cases, you guys were already coding many of these categories but there wasn’t clear guidance or buttons for you to click — we hope that these changes will get rid of these gray areas!

In particular we have made changes to better capture:

• Policies that deal with visiting people
• Policies that deal with weddings and funerals
• Policies that deal with restrictions of mass gatherings that are allowed to occur with conditions
• Policies that deal with elections
• Policies that deal with takeaway and delivery in restaurants
• Policies that deal with Public Awareness Measures for COVID-19 Vaccines

For more detail, please see this documment which outlines what we’ve changed and what this means for you in more detail.

March 19, 2021

Resource Announcement

Get involved in the missing end dates competition! Co-PI Caress Schenk has made a great short video to explain how to get started and you can find the missing end dates for your country here! You can also find additional information in the ‘How do I code end dates’ section in the coding guide and dashboard!

March 16, 2021

Taxonomy update We’ve made a small change for how to input subnational geographical targets.

Many of you have found it onerous to input in the target geographical regions when a country targets the entire country for many countries and subnational regions for some countries at the same time. E.g. country X might implement a travel restriction against 100 countries for the whole country as well as Lombardy and Wuhan in particular – travel is still allowed for the rest of China/Italy.

What we changed: After you choose the option: “One or more geographical or administrative units within one or more countries” in response to the ‘target_geog_level’ question, you now get one follow up question which asks you to choose whether:

• This policy targets both entire countries and subnational targets for some countries
• This policy only has subnational targets

If you choose that ‘This policy targets both entire countries and subnational targets for some countries’ , then you can for example select the 100 countries for which the policy targets the entire country first, and then the 2 countries (China and Italy) for which the policy only targets subnational regions in a second question.

How this affects you: Hopefully it is easier to input in policies when the target is both the entire country and subnational targets for some countries.

March 10, 2021

Coding goals

You’re already up to date for your country by October 1st for March 1st — great!

• You can either then start getting your data ready until Feb 1st by June 1st or
• You can check in with your regional/country manager to see if they need help to get other countries in the region up to date until October 1st. Still working on the October 1st by march 1st deadline? — No worries
• Keep at it and ask for help if you need it. Once you get there, let your RM/CM know and then switch up to the goals above. 

As you’re working towards the above goals, please continue follow the priority groups for policy types which are listed on the main dashbaord (e.g. group 1 is Lockdown, Curfew and Quarantine)

February 18, 2021

Taxonomy update : We’ve added a couple of small questions to the curfew and restrictions of mass gatherings.

For Curfews

• What we changed: We’ve noticed that some countries have different curfew times depending on the day of the week (e.g. you can’t go out after 9pm on Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays but you can on the other days of the week). To capture this, we’ve added two new question: type_curfew_freq which asks you to record whether curfew times do in fact differ depending on the day of the week or not and type_curfew_day which allows you to capture the days and time of the curfew if in fact they are different. See the printed survey under the [type_sub_cat] policy for ‘Curfew’ for more info.

• How this affects you: Note that for previous curfew policies that you coded which did not depend on the day of the week, the [type_curfew_freq] question will be filled automatically, so no need to worry about backcoding this! If you previously coded a policy for which the curfew times did differ depending on the day of the week, then you should ‘correct’ this policy given these new questions.

For restrictions of mass gatherings:

• What we changed: We’ve added a new question that notes whether the mass gathering is for indoor, outdoor, both or not specified if the sub type is ‘All/Unspecified mass gatherings’. See the printed survey under the [type_sub_cat] policy for ‘Restrictions of Mass Gathering’ for more info.
• How this affects you: It would be great if you could backcode these policies to capture this distinction, unfortunately there is no way to automate this, but no worries about this counting for getting the data clean and complete up to October 1st.

February 3, 2021

Resource Announcement

Finding it difficult/confusing to clean/sort through a policy history? Natalia Filkina-Spreizer and Sarah Edmonds have done a really awesome job making a new video which goes through examples of how to check if a policy history is clean and Nathan Ruhde has written some fantastic textual guidance as well. You can also find these resources in the coding guide and dashboard!

January 31, 2021

Resource Announcement

Natalia Filkina-Spreizer and Sarah Edmonds have done a great job of making a couple of short but concise videos which explain how to code and update health testing and health monitoring policies and COVID-19 vaccines. You can also find them in the dashboard and in the coding guide.

September 27, 2021

Did you ever have a question about the project and didn’t know how to ask? Are you wondering about how CoronaNet is being funded? Or about Cindy’s favorite cheese? Join CoronaNet’s first Townhall during the next weekly meeting on Wednesday, September 29, 2021, at 4:30pm (CEST) and ask about everything you ever wanted to know!

Please use this survey to pose your questions. Your question will be completely anonymous, so feel free to ask about anything!

September 13, 2021

BIG ANNOUNCEMENT! We are making some project changes in the coming weeks! Based on feedback from you in previous surveys as well as just hunkering down to think about where it makes the most sense to concentrate our efforts, we are making some changes in terms of:

• Setting Goals for the Project with differentiated project-wide targets and more country/region-specific goal-making

• Improving Monitoring and Feedback Mechanisms with a RA Internal Survey, RM/CM Monthly Check-Ins and more specific feedback on which policies need checking

• Providing better support and tools for reaching these goals with data from external datasets to integrate, better visualization tools (Tableau) and record editing (CornEdit)

In short we hope that these changes will both improve communication and expectation setting on the project as well as make your jobs of assessing, planning, coding and cleaning much easier and smoother. To get a more detailed idea what these changes entail and why we’re making them, you can take a look at the recording (Passcode: iP+LHc9T) of our previous weekly meeting, the accompanying slides or this website!

September 9, 2021

Want to keep track of all the events that are happening at CoronaNet? Check out our new event calendar including all upcoming events like coding hours, end-date-a-thons, ask your PIs sessions and much more!

You can also find this calendar under the Communication tab on the Main Dashboard.

September 9, 2021

We’re excited to announce the first upcoming events this fall!! Mark your calenders for:

• The COVID-19 Public Health and Social Measures (PHSMs) Research Outcome Conference, which brings together all COVID-19 policy trackers and scholars to discuss findings on COVID-19. Thanks for everyone who submitted their work and we’re looking forward to seeing all of you there on October 5-6, 2021.

• We’ll have an End-Date-O-Ween on October 31, 2021 hosted by @Tasia. Come hang out and code end dates together in the hang out room! Show up in a costume to get extra points!

• Ask Your PIs is coming back! Ask us all you ever wanted to know and stuff you probably didn’t want to know at the end of the weekly meetings. Next week, September 15, from 5pm onwards we have our very own @Caress Schenk with us!

September 9, 2021

We know you’ve all been working hard coding policies for your region and we’d love to learn about what is happening there! We’re looking for volunteers to spend 5 minutes giving us the downlow on the crazy things happening in your region. For this, we have prepared a pool of questions and you can choose up to three of them for presenting your country snapshot. If you are interested in participating, reach out to @Tasia on Slack for more details!

September 6, 2021

WE ARE BACK! We hope everyone has had a nice summer break and are excited for the many upcoming events in the following months. Thanks for all your work and dedication on this project; there would be no data without this amazing community, excited to see what we can do together in the fall!

(Meme credit goes to Rohan Bhavikatti)

August 16, 2021

Almost three months have passed and it is time for your input again! Please make sure to fill out the RA Internal Survey for every country you are coding for which asks you about the state of the data AND the Well Being Survey which asks you anonymously about your experience and satisfaction with the project.

Please try to fill out these surveys by this Friday, August 23!! They are really important because they help us get a better sense of where the data is, and thus how we should plan for future data collection and they also help us get a better sense of how you are all doing and what we could improve/do better. All of your input is incredibly valuable to making sure we’re all doing the best we can!!

August 16, 2021

Before we head off on our two week break, we will have our CoronaNet Summer Slumber Party next Friday from 2-6pm CEST where we will play games, watch movies and in general just have fun! Let’s relax, have some fun together and celebrate the amazing work we are all doing. We hope that you can join us in the the community hangout room (Password: 12345) and look forward to meeting more of you there!

July 27, 2021

As you all know, we’re in it for the long haul and its important to take breaks to relax, refresh and get reinvigorated. This is why we are planning a two-week project break from August 23rd to September 3rd. You’ve all been doing an amazing job assessing, planning, coding and cleaning policies; some of you for more than a year at this point; and if anyone deserves a vacation its you!

July 27, 2021

Join the community hangout room (Password: 12345) on August 4th from 5-8pm CEST for the End-date-Olympics to code end dates and watch the closing ceremony of the Olympics together!

July 21, 2021

We hit the milestone of 80,000 policies this week - great work everyone! Without your amazing effort and engagement, this would not have been possible, thanks to all of you!!

July 12, 2021

Have you wanted to have a cool way to show the work you’ve done on the project? Well now you have that chance! We are happy to introduce our new badges and titles! There are three levels that you can work toward:



Put the title on your CV, add the specific badge to your status on slack, and have them on your official CoronaNet certificate!

July 05, 2021

Did you ever have a suggestion or comment you wanted to make but didn’t want to wait until the next well-being survey or you didn’t feel comfortable bringing the issue up with your manager or in the general meeting?

Introducing the Anonymous Comment Box for your positive, negative or neutral feedback!

Only the prefects have access to the raw responses and including your name is optional, but if you are bringing up an issue that you would like our help solving please include your name so we can help.

May 26, 2021

The End-Date-A-Thon Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back is coming on June 4, 2020 12pm CET to June 5, 12pm CET. Come join us for an hour or two to clean missing end dates, meet new people on the project and have fun! Collective prizes/rewards for every 500 policies cleaned (e.g. the PIs will wear funny hats to the next weekly meeting)

May 19, 2021

We care about your well-being. Please take the mandatory Well-Being survey here by June 1st so we can get a better idea of how you are all doing (and earn an additional 5 Hogwarts points as well!)

May 19, 2021

The End-Date-A-Thon Episode V: Empire Strikes Back is coming soon! Please take the doodle here by May 26, 2021 so we can find a time that works best for everyone

April 27, 2021

We will host two (identical) coordinating sessions to accommodate as many people as possible:

• Session 1: Thursday April 29 from 10am-11pm CET, meeting link here (Passcode: 821783) hosted by Svanhildur
• Session 2: Thursday April 29, 4pm - 5pm CET, meeting link here (Passcode: 699940) hosted by Cindy

Feel free to join if you have time to learn more about how you can help out (or just about the event itself) — if you didn’t take the doodle poll, a heads up beforehand to Svanhildur or I would be appreciated but not necessary.

April 22, 2021

Our first ever End-Date-A-Thon will take place 12pm CET April 30 to 12pm CET May 1st. We’re making this a 24 hour event so that people from all the time zones can participate. Come join us for an hour or two to code missing end dates together, meet other people on the project and have fun! In the sign up sheet for the end-date-of-thon you will see that we are organising the day into:

• 4 hour blocks:

  • First hour is intro to the event/Q&A
  • Second hour is music/coding hour
  • Third hour is social hour
  • Fourth hour is a wild card hour

• Goals/rewards

  • Goals from 500, 1000, 1500, 2000 …. etc. missing end dates fixed: every 500 is another ‘milestone’
  • Prizes and Awards for every milestone (like getting the PIs to sing a silly song, more details soon) !

• We will run updates on the numbers on how we’re progressing as fast as we can run the pipeline, (likely every two hours)

• Happy for feedback on how to make this as fun as possible! —> let us know on Slack or feel free to enter in your suggestions in the ‘Additional ideas’ column in the sign up sheet above

• No need to sign up to participate — the sign up sheet is mostly so that we can get an idea of how many people are interested and plan accordingly

We’re also looking for people to help host some events. If you’re interested in helping out (or just learning more about the event) please write down your name under the ‘Event Host Sign Up’ in the sign up sheet above and take this doodle so that we can find the best time together on Thursday April 29 to have a coordination meeting.

April 19, 2021

Have trouble finding reputable sources for coding policies in your country? Are NGOs/IO’s stepping in to address many of the pandemic’s effects? Join the CoronaNet Low State Capacity Workshop at 5pm CET on April 23 to discuss these issues. DM Cindy for more details!

April 13, 2021

Curious about what the PIs at CoronaNet do? Don’t miss the ‘Ask Your PI’ session which we will have during our weekly general meetings which take place every Wednesday at 4:30 CET. Mark your calendars for the following ‘Ask Your PI’ sessions:

• April 14: Allison Hartnett
• April 28: Joan Barceló
• May 05: Bob Kubinec

March 31, 2021

Please join us for our 1-year Anniversary party on April 2, 4-8pm CET for games, music and celebration of CoronaNet RAs! The event will be held in the CoronaNet Community Hangout Room (Password: 12345)

March 31, 2021

Co-PI Dr. Allison Spencer Hartnett will be hosting a [stress and time management workshop] on April 5, 9am PST/6pm CET. Go to the Slack #general channel for the link and password!

March 12, 2021

We hit a milestone of 60,000 policies this week — amazing work everyone!

March 12, 2021

The project is getting more and more visibility. The Oxford tracker gives us a big shoutout in their new publication in Nature Human Behaviour and we also got a nice mention in an article by Nature news.

March 12, 2021

Remember time zone changes are coming!!! Please be mindful/double check the times when scheduling meetings and attending the weekly meeting

March 12, 2021

The COVID-19 PHSMS Data Coverage conference that we had last week was a great success, thanks so much again to everyone who came out and especially to Annika Kaiser, Ezgi Caki, Klea Vogli, Maryam AlHammadi and Vanessa Zwisele for their help and support to make it happen. We will be piloting initiatives to integrate data from other datasets country by country and we’ll see how it goes; unless we tap you on the shoulder for this, just sit tight and don’t worry too much about it.

March 9, 2021

Please be aware that WE UPDATED OUR WEEKLY MEETING ZOOM LINK Password: CoronaNet

March 8, 2021

Join our ‘Back to the 80s’ party today between 5-7pm CET on March 12 in the Community Hangout Room (Password: 12345); DJ Lucky Luca will be playing hits from the Reagan years!

March 1, 2021

CoronaNet Code of Conduct: As announced in the weekly meeting last week, with more than 600 RAs working on collecting data on government responses to COVID-19, it is crucial that we treat each other with respect. Please read the CoronaNet Code of Conduct which provides a framework for how RAs are expected to treat each other and what they can do if they experience a problem. Thanks in particular to the Hogwarts prefects for taking the lead on this

February 26, 2021

Join our 90s party today between 6-8pm CET in the Community Hangout Room (Password: 12345); DJ Lucky Luca will play hot decks from the 90s and you can also request a song.